LONDON...IHT....suzy menkes
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The sensual and seductive work of Francois Boucher has seduced a new generation of designers, although the Rococo spirit of the 18th-century French painter would seem a world away from minimalist modern style.
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With the centenary of the Anglo/French entente cordiale as its focus, "Boucher, Seductive Visions" at the Wallace Collection here until April 17 is greeting visitors with festoons of ribbons on the railings, garlands of powder blue drapes and tag lines intoning, "We invite you to enter into a world of decadence and seduction."
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"Rococo a go-go" would be the appropriate title for this show, which was opened last month by Vivienne Westwood. The iconoclastic British designer not only came dressed with bows at the bosom to recreate the famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour, whose complicity with Boucher was designed to burnish her self-image as Louis XV's mistress and confidante. Westwood also dedicated her summer 2005 show to the sweeps and swishes of fabrics inspired by the paintings.
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"I wanted it to be arbitrary, not to think too much about it and I thought what we have got here is 1950s and Rococo," says Westwood. "The connection to my own clothes is that it is on the body and off-body. I had used French art in the past as models for excellence, and the Wallace collection is the most wonderful school of art in the country."
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Westwood also says that she finds 18th-century clothing "incredibly modern because it is so light," referring to dresses in feather-weight taffeta. "I wanted the collection to be very spontaneous," she said.
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Westwood, always prone to fashion historicism, was not the only designer to find modernity in drapes and swathes. Although current models are anything but voluptuous, the idea of folds falling across the body in an offhand way fits 21st-century fashion's new enlightenment.
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Jo Hedley, the exhibition's curator, said Boucher's universe represented an early vision of absolute luxury. The display includes not just the paintings, but Chinese lacquer boxes, Boulle furniture and Boucher-inspired S?vres porcelain, all gilded rococo curlicues and playful pink putti prancing on a turquoise ground.
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'Fashion was terribly important to Boucher in his celebration of the senses," said Hedley, referring not just to the rich fabrics and juicy colors in pastoral settings, but also to what she calls "a fascination with the toilette." That includes the subject of a chinoiserie tapestry as well as the details of figures playing tenderly with tendrils of hair, threaded with milky pearls, or of cherubs clustering round a goddess like maidservants.
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This is great, I love the styling and that f*ck shirt, lovely....
but I like some of it .. ehh 
